The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people
#51
Margaret C. McCulloch
#159979
Overall Influence
1901 - 1996 (95 years)
Margaret Callender McCulloch was a writer, teacher, and activist during the civil rights movement. McCulloch authored several books and articles on race relations and the segregation of African Americans, as well as two biographies. Her most influential books included Segregation, a Challenge to Democracy and Integration: Promise, Process, Problems. The Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana houses McCulloch's articles, speeches, and correspondences.
Go to Profile#52
Evelyn Crowell
#171501
Overall Influence
1936 - 2017 (81 years)
Evelyn Crowell was a librarian, author, speaker, activist, and community organizer in Portland, Oregon. She was the first single Black woman in Oregon to adopt children. Life Born in Saginaw, Michigan on March 17, 1936, she moved with her father, grandfather, brother, and uncle to Oregon in 1942. They lived in North Portland and the men worked in the shipyards. She attended Boise Elementary school, the Girls Polytechnic High School, and Portland State College. She was in the third graduating class of Portland State College with a bachelor's degree, in 1959. She earned a Master's degree in lib...
Go to Profile#53
Kay George Roberts
#176612
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Kay George Roberts is an American orchestral conductor and a professor of music at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. She is the founder and musical director of the New England Orchestra. She is recognized as the first woman and second African American to receive a doctorate in musical arts from Yale University. As of 2018, she is one of the few female African American conductors in the world.
Go to Profile#54
Reavis L. Mitchell Jr.
#178259
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
Reavis Lee Mitchell Jr. was an American historian and academic administrator. He was the dean of the School of Humanities and Behavioral Social Sciences and professor of history at Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee. He was the chairman of the Tennessee Historical Commission from 2015 to 2020.
Go to Profile#55
Palmira N. Ríos
#179014
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Palmira N. Ríos is an Afro-Puerto Rican academic who has worked as a professor in New York, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. She has served as a commissioner and president of the Puerto Rican Civil Rights Commission, the first person of color or woman to be appointed to the government body. After serving as the dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration for the University of Puerto Rico, she became the Dean of Academic Affairs for the Río Piedras Campus in 2015. The Bar Association of Puerto Rico honored Ríos with the Martin Luther King Jr.-Arturo Alfonso Schomburg Medal for ...
Go to Profile#56
Preston Mitchell
#179850
Overall Influence
Edward Preston Mitchell III was an American football coach and college athletics administrator. He served as the head football at Delaware State University for one season, in 1959, compiling a record of 1–7. Mitchell came to Delaware State in 1956 when he was appointed as athletic director and head of the Department of Health and Physical Education. He has previously been athletic director and head of the Department of Health and Physical Education at Fisk University for two years. Mitchell earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at North Carolina College at Durham—now known as North Carolina C...
Go to Profile#57
Matthew Washington Kennedy
#180820
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Matthew Washington Kennedy was an American classical pianist, professor, choral director, composer, and arranger of Negro Spirituals. He is widely known as the director of the historic Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee from 1957 to 1986.
Go to Profile#58
Andrew Frierson
#183519
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Andrew Benny Frierson was an American operatic baritone and music educator. He was part of the first generation of black opera singers to achieve success and is viewed as part of an instrumental group of performers who helped break down the barriers of racial prejudice in the opera world. In 2000 he was the recipient of the Legacy Award by the National Opera Association, an award given annually to recognize the contributions made by African-American artists to opera in America.
Go to Profile#59
Alicia Henry
#183735
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Alicia Henry is a contemporary artist living, working and teaching in Nashville. Henry is an associate professor in the Language and Arts Department at Fisk University. Henry creates multi-media artwork that focuses on themes of the body and identity. She uses materials such as wood, fabric, paper and pigment for her creations. Henry has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of Art at Yale University.
Go to Profile#60
Anne Gamble Kennedy
#189574
Overall Influence
1920 - 2001 (81 years)
Anne Gamble Kennedy was an American classical pianist, piano professor, and accompanist for the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee. Early life Anne Lucille Gamble was born in Charleston, West Virginia to Dr. Henry Floyd Gamble and the former Nina Hortense Clinton. She was the younger of two children born to that union. She had two older step-siblings as well. She was eleven-years-old when her father was killed in a car accident in 1932. Her paternal grandmother had been born while enslaved on the Howard's Neck Plantation in Goochland County, Virginia. Her paternal grandfather, Henry...
Go to Profile#61
Lois Towles
1912 - 1983 (71 years)
Lois Towles was an American classical pianist, music educator, and community activist. Born in Texarkana, Arkansas, she grew up in the town straddling the Arkansas and Texas line. From an early age, she was interested in music and began piano lessons at age 9. After graduating as valedictorian of her high school class, she obtained a bachelor's degree from Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and worked as a high school teacher from 1936 to 1941. In 1942, Towles enrolled in the University of Iowa and earned two master's degrees in 1943. She went on to further her education at Juilliard, the Univ...
Go to Profile#62
John Wesley Work Jr.
1871 - 1925 (54 years)
John Wesley Work Jr. was a musicologist, who was the first African-American collector of folk songs and spiritualss, and also a choral director, educationalist singer and songwriter. He is now sometimes known as John Wesley Work II, to distinguish him from his son, John Wesley Work III.
Go to Profile#63
Dwight Hillis Wilson
1909 - 1962 (53 years)
Dwight Hillis Wilson Sr. was an American archivist, researcher, and teacher. He was the first archivist of Fisk University. Personal life Wilson was born on October 18, 1909, in Raleigh, North Carolina. His father, a Methodist minister, was also born in South Carolina while his mother came from Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#64
Joseph A. Johnson Jr.
1914 - 1979 (65 years)
Joseph Andrew Johnson Jr. was an African-American theologian. He was a professor of New Testament at the Interdenominational Theological Center and Fisk University, and a bishop of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Go to Profile#65
Miriam E. Carey
1858 - 1937 (79 years)
Miriam Eliza Carey was an American librarian who helped establish the first libraries in prisons and hospitals in Iowa and Minnesota. Education and career Carey studied at Rockford Seminary , Oberlin College, Ohio and the library school of the University of Illinois, .
Go to Profile#66
Benjamin Carl Unseld
1843 - 1923 (80 years)
Benjamin Carl Unseld , better known as B. C. Unseld, was a gospel music teacher, composer, and publisher. Biography Unseld was born October 18, 1843, in Shepherdstown, Virginia. In the early 1860s, he moved to Pennsylvania. Though mostly self-taught, he sang in the choir and accepted a position as organist at the Methodist Church in Columbia, Pennsylvania. He studied music under Eben Tourjée and Theodore F. Seward. B. C. Unseld taught at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, and was the school's first secretary. Later he taught at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and was the first principal of the Virginia Normal School of Music.
Go to Profile#67
W. E. B. Du Bois
1868 - 1963 (95 years)
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the Friedrich Wilhelm University and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.
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James Weldon Johnson
1871 - 1938 (67 years)
James Weldon Johnson was an American writer and civil rights activist. He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , where he started working in 1917. In 1920, he was chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novel, and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of black culture. He wrote the...
Go to Profile#69
Osceola Macarthy Adams
1890 - 1983 (93 years)
Osceola Macarthy Adams was an American actress, drama teacher, director, and clothing designer. She was one of the 22 founders of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Born to a life insurance executive in Albany, Georgia, Macarthy was mixed with European, Native American, and African-American heritage. She attended schools in Albany, Georgia including Albany Normal School, a predecessor to Albany State University, and then attended Fisk University’s Preparatory School. Later, she attended Howard University, where she studied ancient Greek and philosophy. After graduating from Howard, Osceola marrie...
Go to Profile#70
Annette Lewis Phinazee
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Alethia Annette Lewis Hoage Phinazee was the first woman and the first black American woman to earn the doctorate in library science from Columbia University. She was called a trailblazer for her work as a librarian and educator.
Go to Profile#71
Ida B. Wells
1862 - 1931 (69 years)
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an American investigative journalist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People . Wells dedicated her career to combating prejudice and violence, and advocating for African-American equality—especially that of women.
Go to Profile#72
Charles S. Johnson
1893 - 1956 (63 years)
Charles Spurgeon Johnson was an American sociologist and college administrator, the first black president of historically black Fisk University, and a lifelong advocate for racial equality and the advancement of civil rights for African Americans and all ethnic minorities. He preferred to work collaboratively with liberal white groups in the South, quietly as a "sideline activist," to get practical results.
Go to Profile#73
E. Franklin Frazier
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Edward Franklin Frazier , was an American sociologist and author, publishing as E. Franklin Frazier. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled The Negro Family in the United States ; it analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African-American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s. The book was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the most significant work in the field of race relations. It was among the first sociological works on blacks researched and written by a black person.
Go to Profile#74
Arna Bontemps
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Arna Wendell Bontemps was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family. His ancestors included free people of color and French colonists. His father was a contractor and sometimes would take his son to construction sites. As the boy got older, his father would take him along to speak-easies at night that featured jazz. His mother, Maria Carolina Pembroke, was a schoolteacher. The family was Catholic, and Bontemps was baptized at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral. They w...
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Fatima Massaquoi
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
Fatima Massaquoi-Fahnbulleh was a Liberian writer and academic. After completing her education in the United States, she returned to Liberia in 1946, making significant contributions to the cultural and social life of the country.
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Aaron Douglas
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Aaron Douglas was an American painter, illustrator and visual arts educator. He was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He developed his art career painting murals and creating illustrations that addressed social issues around race and segregation in the United States by utilizing African-centric imagery. Douglas set the stage for young, African-American artists to enter the public-arts realm through his involvement with the Harlem Artists Guild. In 1944, he concluded his art career by founding the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught visual art classes at Fisk until his retirement in 1966.
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Henrietta Myers
1878 - 1968 (90 years)
Henrietta Crawley Myers, a.k.a. "Mrs. James A. Myers" was a singer and choral director, primarily known for her work as director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee. Early life Henrietta Crawley was born November 10, 1878, in Nashville, Tennessee, the oldest of 10 children born to Thomas Edward and Mary Jane Crawley. She was educated in the public schools of Nashville, and later at Fisk University. She began her career as a Fisk Jubilee Singer under the direction of John W. Work II.
Go to Profile#78
Helen Clarissa Morgan
1845 - 1914 (69 years)
Helen Clarissa Morgan was an American educator from the U.S. state of New York. She was the first woman to be appointed professor of Latin in a US coeducational college. Early years and education Helen Clarissa Morgan was born in Masonville, New York in 1845. The family moved to Oberlin, Ohio when Morgan was 12 years old. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1866, receiving the degree of bachelor of arts, and in 1911 that college conferred upon her the honorary degree of master of arts.
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Tom Wilson
1931 - 1978 (47 years)
Thomas Blanchard Wilson Jr. was an American record producer best known for his work in the 1960s with Bob Dylan, the Mothers of Invention, Simon & Garfunkel, the Velvet Underground, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Eddie Harris, Nico, Eric Burdon and the Animals, the Blues Project, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and others.
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Lewis Wade Jones
1910 - 1979 (69 years)
Lewis Wade Jones was a sociologist and teacher. He was born in Cuero, Texas, the son of Wade E. and Lucynthia McDade Jones. A member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, he received his AB degree from Fisk University in 1931, and followed it with postgraduate study as a Social Science Research Council Fellow at the University of Chicago in 1931–1932.
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Horace Mann Bond
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Horace Mann Bond was an American historian, college administrator, social science researcher and the father of civil-rights leader Julian Bond. He earned graduate and doctoral degrees from University of Chicago at a time when only a small percentage of any young adults attended any college. He was an influential leader at several historically black colleges and was appointed the first president of Fort Valley State University in Georgia in 1939, where he managed its growth in programs and revenue. In 1945, he became the first African-American president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
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James Dallas Burrus
1846 - 1928 (82 years)
James Dallas Burrus was an American educator, druggist and philanthropist from Tennessee. He and a brother were among the first three graduates of Fisk University, the first African Americans to graduate from a liberal arts college south of the Mason–Dixon line. After completing graduate work in mathematics at Dartmouth College, Burrus became the first professor of mathematics at Fisk University. He later continued his teaching career at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in Mississippi.
Go to Profile#83
Charlemae Hill Rollins
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Charlemae Hill Rollins was a pioneering librarian, writer and storyteller in the area of African-American literature. During her thirty-one years as head librarian of the children's department at the Chicago Public Library as well as after her retirement, she instituted substantial reforms in children's literature.
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John Morton-Finney
1889 - 1998 (109 years)
John Morton-Finney was an American civil rights activist, lawyer, and educator who earned eleven academic degrees, including five law degrees. He spent most of his career as an educator and lawyer after serving from 1911 to 1914 in the U.S. Army as a member of the 24th Infantry Regiment, better known as the Buffalo soldiers, and with the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I. Morton-Finney taught languages at Fisk University in Tennessee and at Lincoln University in Missouri, before moving to Indianapolis, Indiana, where he taught in the Indianapolis Public Schools for forty-seven years.
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Cleo W. Blackburn
1909 - 1978 (69 years)
Cleo Walter Blackburn was an American educator. He was the founder and CEO for The Fundamental Board of Education and a member of the fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Indianapolis Urban League. He received a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation.
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Isaac Fisher
1877 - 1957 (80 years)
Isaac Fisher was an American educator who graduated from Tuskegee Institute, served as principal at Branch Normal College, and taught at several other Historically Black Colleges and Universities. A protege of Booker T. Washington, he advocated vocational education.
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Robert Hayden
1913 - 1980 (67 years)
Robert Hayden was an American poet, essayist, and educator. He served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1976 to 1978, a role today known as US Poet Laureate. He was the first African American writer to hold the office.
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Vivian Wilson Henderson
1923 - 1976 (53 years)
Vivian Wilson Henderson was an American educator and human rights activist, and the eighth president of Clark Atlanta University. Vivian Wilson Henderson became President of Clark College in 1963, at the age of 40, where he would serve as president for 10 consecutive years.
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Erastus Milo Cravath
1833 - 1900 (67 years)
Erastus Milo Cravath was a pastor and American Missionary Association official who after the American Civil War, helped found Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and numerous other historically black colleges in Georgia and Tennessee for the education of freedmen. He also served as president of Fisk University for more than 20 years.
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Charles Cardoza Poindexter
1880 - 1913 (33 years)
Charles Cardoza Poindexter was a professor at Fisk University. Poindexter was also known for being the founder of Alpha Phi Alpha Society which became Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated. Early life Poindexter was born in Pennsboro, West Virginia, on March 10, 1880. He attended high school at the West Virginia Colored Institute , graduating in 1896, and returned for a vocational degree. Poindexter attended Ohio State University from 1899 to 1903 earning a B.Sci in Agriculture. In 1903, he wrote "The Development of the Spikelet and Grain of Corn." Poindexter was said to be a very superior Negro, very light in color.
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Thomas W. Talley
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Thomas Washington Talley was a chemistry professor at Fisk University and a collector of African American folk songs. Early life and education Thomas Washington Talley was born on October 9, 1868, in Shelbyville, Tennessee. He was one of eight children born to former slaves, Charles Washington and Lucinda Talley.
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John Wesley Work III
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
John Wesley Work III was an American composer, educator, choral director, musicologist and scholar of African-American folklore and music. Biography He was born on July 15, 1901, in Tullahoma, Tennessee, to a family of professional musicians. His grandfather, John Wesley Work, was a church choir director in Nashville, where he wrote and arranged music for his choirs. Some of his choristers were members of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers. His father, John Wesley Work, Jr., was a singer, folksong collector and professor of music, Latin, and history at Fisk, and his mother, Agnes Haynes Work, was a singer who helped train the Fisk group.
Go to Profile#93
Ella Sheppard
1851 - 1914 (63 years)
Ella Sheppard was an American soprano, pianist, composer, and arranger of spiritualss. She was the matriarch of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee. She also played the organ and the guitar. Sheppard was a friend and confidante of African-American activists and orators Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass.
Go to Profile#94
Lorenzo Dow Turner
1890 - 1972 (82 years)
Lorenzo Dow Turner was an African-American academic and linguist who did seminal research on the Gullah language of the Low Country of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. His studies included recordings of Gullah speakers in the 1930s. As head of the English departments at Howard University and Fisk University for a combined total of nearly 30 years, he strongly influenced their programs. He created the African Studies curriculum at Fisk, was chair of the African Studies Program at Roosevelt University, and in the early 1960s, cofounded a training program for Peace Corps volunteers going to A...
Go to Profile#95
Mary L. Matthews
1864 - 1950 (86 years)
Mary Louisa Matthews was an American educator and missionary. She taught and was in charge of a Protestant girls school in Monastir , a city in the Macedonian region of Ottoman Turkey, from 1888 to 1920. She was there through the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turk Revolution, Balkan Wars I and II and World War I. She left detailed records of her observations of the turbulent affairs of the region during the thirty-two years she spent there. In 1937, her bravery during World War I was recognized when she was among the first group of women to receive the Alumnae Medal of Honor from Mount Holyoke College.
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George Edmund Haynes
1881 - 1960 (79 years)
George Edmund Haynes was an American sociology scholar and federal civil servant, a co-founder and first executive director of the National Urban League, serving 1911 to 1918. A graduate of Fisk University, he earned a master's degree at Yale University, and was the first African American to earn a doctorate degree from Columbia University, where he completed one in sociology.
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Jimmie Lunceford
1902 - 1947 (45 years)
James Melvin Lunceford was an American jazz alto saxophonist and bandleader in the swing era. Early life Lunceford was born on a farm in the Evergreen community, west of the Tombigbee River, near Fulton, Mississippi, United States. The farm was owned by his father, James. His mother was Idella Shumpert of Oklahoma City, an organist of "more than average ability". Seven months after James Melvin was born, the family moved to Oklahoma City.
Go to Profile#98
Elmer Imes
1883 - 1941 (58 years)
Elmer Samuel Imes was an internationally renowned American physicist who made important contributions in quantum, demonstrating for the first time that Quantum Theory could be applied to the rotational energy states of molecules, as well as the vibration and electronic levels, Imes' work provided an early verification of Quantum Theory, and his spectroscopy instrumentation inventions, which include one of the earliest applications of high resolution infrared spectroscopy led to development of the field of study of molecular structure through infrared spectroscopy; he was also the second African American to earn a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#99
Janis Mayes
Dr. Janis Alene Mayes is an American author, literary critic and translator and a professor in Africana literature. Early life Mayes gained her undergraduate degree in French literature at Fisk University. She was a Fulbright Scholar. She had additional study as a scholar at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. In the 1980s she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she began teaching at Syracuse University in the Department of African American Studies; she is currently a professor there. She teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University.
Go to Profile#100
Sterling Allen Brown
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Sterling Allen Brown was an American professor, folklorist, poet, and literary critic. He chiefly studied black culture of the Southern United States and was a professor at Howard University for most of his career. Brown was the first Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia.
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